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In some programming language environments (at least one proprietary Lisp implementation, for example), [citation needed] the value used as the null pointer (called nil in Lisp) may actually be a pointer to a block of internal data useful to the implementation (but not explicitly reachable from user programs), thus allowing the same register to be used as a useful constant and a quick way of ...
Null pointer dereference – A null pointer dereference will often cause an exception or program termination in most environments, but can cause corruption in operating system kernels or systems without memory protection or when use of the null pointer involves a large or negative offset.
To expose dangling pointer errors, one common programming technique is to set pointers to the null pointer or to an invalid address once the storage they point to has been released. When the null pointer is dereferenced (in most languages) the program will immediately terminate—there is no potential for data corruption or unpredictable behavior.
Dereferencing a null pointer in C produces undefined behavior, [7] which could be catastrophic. However, most implementations [citation needed] simply halt execution of the program in question, usually with a segmentation fault. However, initializing pointers unnecessarily could hinder program analysis, thereby hiding bugs.
Determining the root cause – debugging the bug – can be simple in some cases, where the program will consistently cause a segmentation fault (e.g., dereferencing a null pointer), while in other cases the bug can be difficult to reproduce and depend on memory allocation on each run (e.g., dereferencing a dangling pointer).
The Power of 10 Rules were created in 2006 by Gerard J. Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software. [1] The rules are intended to eliminate certain C coding practices that make code difficult to review or statically analyze.
In C the use of any automatic variable before it has been initialized yields undefined behavior, as does integer division by zero, signed integer overflow, indexing an array outside of its defined bounds (see buffer overflow), or null pointer dereferencing. In general, any instance of undefined behavior leaves the abstract execution machine in ...
In object-oriented programming, the safe navigation operator (also known as optional chaining operator, safe call operator, null-conditional operator, null-propagation operator) is a binary operator that returns null if its first argument is null; otherwise it performs a dereferencing operation as specified by the second argument (typically an ...